Gender in English

The third-person singular personal pronouns are chosen according to the natural gender of their antecedent or referent. As a general rule:

• he (and its related forms him, himself, his) is used when the referent is male, or something to which male characteristics are attributed;
• she (and her, herself, hers) is used when the referent is female, or is an object personified as female[12] – this is common with vessels such as ships and airplanes, and sometimes with countries. An example is in God Bless America: "Stand beside her, and guide her through the night with a light from above."
• it (and itself, its) is used when the referent is something inanimate or intangible, a non-animal life-form such as a plant, an animal of unknown sex, or, less often, a child when the sex is unspecified or deemed unimportant. It is also used in the interrogative for people in some phrases such as, "Who is it?".

Pronoun agreement is generally with the natural gender of the referent (the person or thing denoted) rather than simply the antecedent (a noun or noun phrase which the pronoun replaces). For example, one might say either the doctor and his patients or the doctor and her patients, depending on one's knowledge or assumptions about the sex of the doctor in question, as the phrase the doctor (the antecedent) does not itself have any specific natural gender. Also, pronouns are sometimes used without any explicit antecedent. However, as noted above (the example with child and daughter), the choice of pronoun may also be affected by the particular noun used in the antecedent.

(When the antecedent is a collective noun, such as family or team, and the pronoun refers to the members of the group denoted rather than the group as a single entity, a plural pronoun may be chosen: compare the family and its origins; the family and their breakfast-time arguments. See also synesis.)

When the referent is a person of unknown or unspecified sex, several different options are possible:

• use of he or she, he/she, s/he, etc.
• alternation or random mixture of she and he
• use of singular they (common especially in informal language)
• use of it (normally only considered when the referent is a young child)
• use of generic he (traditional, but not recommended by modern grammars)

Most transgender people use the standard pronouns (he, she, etc.) that match their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth. Referring to transgender people using natural gender pronouns according to their sex assigned at births, known as misgendering, can be perceived as extremely offensive if done deliberately, and often as embarrassing or hurtful if done accidentally. Most people with a non-binary gender identity use the singular they.[13] A minority accept he or she, alternate between he and she, or prefer gender-neutral pronouns such as zie.[14]

In principle, animals are triple-gender nouns, being able to take masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns. However, animals viewed as less important to humans, also known as ‘lower animals’, are generally referred to using it; higher (domestic) animals may more often be referred to using he and she, when their sex is known.[15] If the sex of the animal is not known, the masculine pronoun is often used with a sex-neutral meaning.[15] For example:

Person A: Ah, there's an ant

Person B: Well put him outside[15]

Animate pronouns he and she are usually applied to animals when personification and/or individuation occurs.[15] Personification occurs whenever human attributes are applied to the noun.[15] For example:

A widow bird sat mourning for her love.[15]

Specifically named animals are an example of individuation, such as Peter Rabbit or Blob the Whale.[15] In these instances, it is more likely that animate pronouns he or she will be used to represent them.[15]

These rules also apply to other triple-gender nouns, including ideas, inanimate objects, and words like infant and child.[15]

Gendered pronouns are occasionally applied to sexless objects in English, such as ships, tools, or robots. This is known as metaphorical gender (as opposed to natural or grammatical gender).[16] This personification of objects is usually done for poetic effect or to show strong emotional attachment.[16]

Although the use of she and he for inanimate objects is not very frequent in Standard Modern English, it is fairly widespread in some varieties of English.[15] Gender assignment to inanimate nouns in these dialects is sometimes fairly systematic. For example, in some dialects of southwest England, masculine pronouns are used for individuated or countable matter, such as iron tools, while the neuter form is used for non-individuated matter, such as liquids, fire and other substances.[15][17]

One common use of metaphorical gender is referring to ships as she. This is the case even for ships named after men, such as HMS King George V; otherwise, the gender of inanimate objects with proper names tends to match the gender connotation of the name. The origins of this practice are not certain, and it is currently in decline and sometimes considered offensive. In modern English it is advised against by The Chicago Manual of Style,[18] New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, and The Associated Press Stylebook. The Cambridge Dictionary considers the practice "old-fashioned".[19]

The Oxford English Dictionary dates written examples of calling ships she to at least 1308 (in the Middle English period), in materials translated from French, which has grammatical gender.[20] One modern source claims that ships were treated as masculine in early English, and that this changed to feminine by the sixteenth century.[21] In the 1640 English Grammar, author Ben Jonson unambiguously documents the neuter gender "under which are comprised all inanimate things, a ship excepted: of whom we say she sails well, though the name be Hercules, or Henry, or the Prince."[22] Various folk theories on the origin include the tradition of naming of ships after goddesses, well-known women, female family members or objects of affection (though ships have male and non-personal names), the tradition of having a female figurehead on the front of the ship (though men and animals are also used as figureheads), and various justifications (many satirical) comparing the attributes of ships with women.[23]

She is also sometimes used as an alternative to it for countries, when viewed as political entities.[24]

Other English pronouns are not subject to male/female distinctions, although in some cases a distinction between animate and inanimate referents is made. For example, the word who (as an interrogative or relative pronoun) refers to a person or people, and rarely to animals (although the possessive form whose can be used as a relative pronoun even when the antecedent is inanimate), while which and what refer to inanimate things (and non-human animals). Since these pronouns function on a binary gender system, distinguishing only between animate and inanimate entities, this suggests that English has a second gender system which contrasts with the primary gender system.[15] It should also be noted that relative and interrogative pronouns do not encode number. This is shown in the following example:

The man who lost his head vs. the men who lost their heads[15]

Other pronouns which show a similar distinction include everyone/everybody vs. everything, no one/nobody vs. nothing, etc.

Nouns such as ship can be indicated by the feminine pronoun she but not the relative pronoun who.

Apart from pronouns, sex is mainly marked in personal names and certain titles. Many words in modern English refer specifically to people or animals of a particular sex, although sometimes the specificity is being lost (for example, duck need not refer exclusively to a female bird; cf. Donald Duck). Likewise, many feminine and masculine job titles (steward/stewardess, waiter/waitress) have undergone a process of becoming gender-neutralised in recent decades (see below).

An example of an English word that has retained gender-specific spellings is the noun-form of blond/blonde, with the former being masculine and the latter being feminine. This distinction is retained primarily in British English.[25]

Certain words' spellings are indicative of their original grammatical genders, which may not correspond to their natural genders, for example abscissa, which is derived from a Latin feminine word. Certain foreign expressions used in English exhibit distinctions of grammatical gender, for example tabula rasa.

Certain gender-indicative suffixes denoting humans eliminate any practical distinction between natural gender and grammatical gender, for example -ess as in hostess; some gender-related suffixes are almost never perceived as related to grammatical gender, for example -itis, a suffix meaning inflammation, which is derived from Greek feminines.

Many words that retain their feminine endings refer to geographical regions (for example Africa) and stars (for example lucida).

Speakers of West Country English may use masculine (rather than neuter) pronouns with non-animate referents, as can be seen in Thomas Hardy's works.

A similar case is found in Newfoundland English. Harold Paddock observed the following in 1981:

Nouns seem to possess a well defined but covert system of grammatical gender. We may call a noun masculine, feminine or neuter depending on the pronouns which it selects in the singular. Mass or non-count nouns (such as frost, fog, water, love) are called neuter because they select the pronoun it. Count nouns divide into masculine and feminine. Female humans and most female animals, as well as all types of vehicles (land, air and sea) are feminine, in that they select the pronouns she, her. Other count nouns are masculine in that they select the pronouns he, 'en.[26]

Examples of "masculine" nouns in Newfoundland English are hat, shovel, book, and pencil; "feminine" are boat, aeroplane; "neuter" nouns include water, fog, weather, and snow. [26]

Inanimate count nouns in Newfoundland Vernacular English differ from those in Standard English in that they are either masculine or feminine. Specifically, if an inanimate count noun denotes a mobile entity, then it is feminine; otherwise such a noun is masculine. Such a gender assignment is similar to but slightly different from that in Wessex Vernacular English. In Wessex Vernacular English, a non-human count noun (be it animate or not) is regarded as masculine, for example the word cow is considered as masculine.[26]

This feature is stigmatized, widely regarded as a lower class or incorrect way of speaking. Nonetheless, one may find such a gender assignment less counterintuitive as nouns such as ship and boat can be referred to by the feminine pronoun in Standard English.[26]